


Fugue

by i_claudia



Series: Gentlemen of Quality [4]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Drug Addiction, Implied Underage, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-03
Updated: 2010-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-05 20:49:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/410872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_claudia/pseuds/i_claudia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For as long as Merlin can remember, he’s lived here, in this warren of tenements and crumbling buildings, has run and played and fallen on its narrow, dirty streets, thrown snowballs and chunks of ice at the odd scowling policeman who occasionally wanders through.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fugue

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ [here](http://i-claudia.livejournal.com/48809.html). (3 February 2010)

For as long as Merlin can remember, he’s lived here, in this warren of tenements and crumbling buildings, has run and played and fallen on its narrow, dirty streets, thrown snowballs and chunks of ice at the odd scowling policeman who occasionally wanders through. He lives with his mother in a tiny room with one window just big enough for him to stick his head out of, which some days is all he needs: just proof enough that somewhere above the soot and smoke of London there’s a sky and maybe even stars.

Merlin’s mother teaches him his letters when he’s young, before she starts coughing and loses her job at the factory, before he has to find work himself to pay for bread and the sharp-smelling medicine that smoothes the creases in her forehead. He doesn’t really mind, at first; he likes being able to get out and see a little bit more of the world.

He works at the factory himself at first, until he’s late one too many times and the floor manager throws him out without paying him for the day. He shrugs and goes on; the snow had been beautiful that morning, thick and unexpected, softening the solid grayness of the world, and for a little while he’d forgotten that his mother was dying: quietly, surely, trying to hide her handkerchief from him so he wouldn’t see the scarlet stains.

He’s always been slight, and he finds work as a chimney sweep for a time, coming home filthy with soot and exhausted, clutching a bottle for his mother in one hand and bread or newspapers he’d fished out of the gutter in the other, sometimes a sausage or two if the butcher’s wife was feeling generous and flush with Christian charity that day. But the work isn’t steady, and it doesn’t pay enough to make the rent, though he doesn’t tell his mother that. He has a shouting match with the landlord one afternoon which ends with his ears boxed and an ultimatum: find the rent by the end of the week or he and his mother are out on the street.

His mother won’t survive three days in the streets; he knows it as surely as he knows his own name. He’s ambling moodily along the street afterward, kicking at loose cobblestones and the detritus of a filthy, rotten city, when someone knocks into him, nearly sends him flying backward to land on his arse.

“Watch yourself,” the man cries out, patting the black expanse of his overcoat, and Merlin glares at him – as if it was his fault! “Damned pickpockets,” the man mutters, striding away, and Merlin’s hit by a flash of blinding, faultless brilliance. He stands for a moment in the street, savouring it, before sprinting for more prosperous streets.

Picking pockets is almost laughably easy. He watches carefully – he’s lived long enough in the neighborhood to know who the good pickpockets are and who merely talks big – and when he thinks he’s ready he slides up to a promising looking gentlemen and nicks the man’s wallet, pretty as you please. The money’s enough to pay their rent for a month, and Merlin’s able to buy his mother another bottle of medicine to boot.

He doesn’t tell his mother he’s not a sweep anymore, and she doesn’t ask; he’s glad, because he’s never lied to her in his life but he doesn’t think he can stomach what her face might look like if she knew her son had turned to thieving. Because he is thieving – it started with pockets but now he takes the bags of gentlemen who look educated or important, knocks into them and yanks their cases away before putting his head down and running, too quick for their yells to do more than irritate the watch.

The bags aren’t for the landlord, or even his mother. They hold worlds more than money, though he pawns them and almost everything they hold and sometimes has enough to pay for a doctor, even if it is just old Toby the leech from down the street, who locks the door and always comes out looking even more sorrowful than usual. Merlin devours the newspapers the bags hold, leafs through accounts and letters of business, learns about the world by piecing together bits of an ever-widening puzzle.

Once, he finds a book, a true book with gold-edged pages half-hidden in the gutter, soiled nearly to the point of being unreadable, but he pores over it anyway, leafing through its pages hungrily under the streetlamps until the police chase him away. He starts stealing from shops after that, wanders in looking innocent and as clean as possible, his hair as neat as he can get it without a mirror or a comb, and slides the first book that looks interesting beneath his shirt before ducking out again. He reads them all voraciously, greedily, soaking up the words with a vengeance – philosophy and poetry, Psalters and astrology, everything and anything he can lay hands on.

He gets caught a few times, has a taste of the nightstick, and soon enough most of the shopkeepers begin to recognize him, throw him out almost before he walks in the door. It doesn’t stop him; when he has a little extra money he bribes other boys, more respectable-looking, sometimes older, to go in and take the books for him. It’s not always a foolproof plan. Once, Merlin bribes a wealthy-looking boy he’s never seen before to steal a book and the boy comes back with something in French. Merlin looks at the title and then at the boy, helplessly angry at the failure.

“Oh,” the boy says, his broad, open face wrinkled with concern. “I didn’t think of that. You can’t speak French, can you?”

Merlin sneers in answer, and is about to turn away and cut his losses when the boy grabs his arm. “Wait,” he says. “I could teach you, if you like.”

Merlin can’t pay for lessons since he used the last of his money bribing the boy in the first place, but after the boy slants a few pointed glances and shy comments in his direction, they clear that issue up well enough. There’s the laws against it, of course, but Merlin’s done enough breaking the law elsewhere to earn himself years in hard labour anyway, and he can’t deny he’s never thought of this, can’t pretend he doesn’t enjoy the way their bodies slide together, learning how their awkward angles somehow fit together all too neatly.

The boy’s name is Will. He’s eager in a cautious sort of way, moved quicker to anger than to laughter, fiercely loyal when he comes across Merlin having the sense kicked out of him by a trio from a gang who think he’s stealing their business. Will comes out of the scuffle with a black eye and an enormous smile which shows off all too clearly his newly-chipped tooth, and declares it a capital lark, well done, Merlin; next time, he says, they’ll have to give them _hell_ for it, his eyes sparkling at the forbidden curse.

They meet every day, for payment or for lessons. Will teaches him French, and when Merlin’s learned enough to read the book Will stole for him they move on to Latin, and then the little Greek Will’s managed to learn from his tutor, though his grammar is weak and his pronunciation execrable. Will is a prickly teacher, likes to ignore constructions he doesn’t understand, but Merlin pays him gladly, arching beneath the other boy as they learn each others’ bodies, and Will brings him books stolen from his uncle’s library, his smile widening when he sees Merlin’s face light up. The stacks grow steadily around them as they study, their dark heads bowed together over a text as Merlin parses out the words and meanings. Merlin treasures those days, lying naked with his legs entwined with Will’s on a reeking mattress made out of a pile of rags in an old abandoned factory, listening as Will rants about Cicero and Aristotle and whether or not buckles will be in fashion next season. His mother smiles more and coughs less, and something warm is growing inside him, indistinct and feathery with hope.

He should have known better than to trust to luck. One afternoon, he and Will are very nearly caught as they gasp and thrust together, and it’s only when Will goes still and covers Merlin’s moan with a hand that Merlin hears the heavy tread on the stairs – thieves or police, it doesn’t matter – and they leap apart and scramble for their trousers, taking separate ways out by silent agreement.

Merlin’s hard pressed to remember when he last felt so angry. He punches a wall on the way home, because he likes Will, is almost surprised how much he likes Will, and now their quiet privacy has been violated, maybe for good; besides, if anyone does stumble upon their nest, it’s entirely possible that all his books will disappear – a loss Merlin doesn’t even want to think about.

When he arrives home, a pocketbook that isn’t his own shoved down the front of his trousers and a new bottle of medicine in hand, his mother is coughing. That’s nothing new, but she never stops, the cough a constant, deep rattle in her chest. She can barely breathe, can’t speak except in broken whispers, and Merlin has to leave the room to vomit twice in the street during the night.

The coughing stops just before dawn is breaking, and Merlin sighs in relief, letting his shoulders slump, before he looks over to his mother’s bed and sees her, pale and utterly, terribly still. There’s something that should be wrong about that, something screaming at the edges of his thoughts, but he covers her mechanically with a blanket so she doesn’t catch cold and feels nothing, just a clear hollowness keeping out the world.

He folds her last clean handkerchief and puts it in his pocket before walking out the door, hesitating only a moment for one look back at where his mother is finally resting peacefully. He leaves the door open. It’s the only thing he can do for her; someone will find her, make sure she has the pauper’s grave which is the only thing they can afford.

He goes to the factory, holes up like a rat in the nest he and Will have made, safe from emotion behind the walls of books they’ve built up to keep their refuge sacred. The familiar words are comforting; he mouths the sounds and syllables silently, letting gerunds and ablative clauses wash clean his mind. He tells himself he isn’t waiting for Will, but he is, he knows he is; he needs someone to hold onto, needs the weight of Will’s body against his own to bring him back down to earth.

Three days pass before he admits to himself Will isn’t going to show, has probably been scared off for good by the threat of discovery. Will always had more to lose than Merlin: a comfortable home, a father who expects him to marry well and carry on the family business. Merlin doesn’t blame him for leaving this place behind.

The old floors are soaked with machine oil and light easily when Merlin sets the nest on fire. The whole building will probably burn to the ground before anyone can do a thing about it. Merlin isn’t really concerned about it, though; the factory’s set well apart from neighboring buildings, and if any of the tenements do go up in flames and death, it’s the tenants’ fault for living there, for allowing themselves to be the dregs of society. It’s an unfair thought, one he thinks he’s horrified for having, but he can’t concentrate long enough to regret it.

There’s a burn under his skin which matches the blazing building behind him, a tight, hot kind of anger which simmers and makes his blood sing out. For a moment, when the fire’s long out of sight behind him, he stops, wavers, unsure, before reaching into his pocket and discovering that next to his mother’s handkerchief he still has the bottle of his mother’s medicine. The first sip is awful, the second less so, and by the time he’s drunk half the little bottle he’s wondering why he never did this before. His body is floating somewhere beyond his mind, the world far away and yet brighter than the clearest crystal – for a moment he catches a glimpse of all existence, and it nearly brings him to tears in its terrible beauty.

He finds himself on unfamiliar streets when the effects fade, and drinks more because the return of the low grey skies and sooty streets is more than he can bear. What is his life supposed to be, now that he has nothing? Laudanum numbs those thoughts, consumes them and returns something greater, something clean and new and wrenchingly magnificent.

He steals to eat when he needs to, which isn’t often, and more frequently steals because he can, takes things he doesn’t want or need and leaves them in back alleys for the whores and urchins to fight over, tooth and claw. Sometimes when stealing isn’t enough to see him through the week, when it isn’t enough to keep him in medicine and food both, he wanders through Whitechapel, lingers in alleys and on corners until nervous, sweating burghers find him and take what he has to offer. And he writes. He loses track of the number of pages he uses while the laudanum spins him through the universe, earth-shattering theses and careful, faultless exhibitions of logic, but whenever he comes back to them sober the blinding light that drove him is gone; they’re lists of words strung together, gibberish.

That doesn’t bother him. The answers are there, he knows they are; he’s seen them, only has to coax them out into the open. Laudanum isn’t enough after a while, and he digs deeper into the underbelly of the city, finding dingy places to share with other souls as hollow as he is, as eager to be filled by smoke and the distant promise of euphoria. He gets into fights, sometimes; other times he sits nursing tankards while he waxes gloriously poetic about the world, about rebellion from within, from beneath, from all sides in all places. Not riots, no drawn-out battles with blood running in the streets, like the frogs, not on proper English soil, but a quiet rebellion, a revolt with words instead of guns.

It’s an infinitely appealing topic, one which from time to time earns him supper or a free drink, but too often he ends up with a black eye, a cracked tooth or rib when he steps too far, prods too fiercely at some soft spot or stumbles and fetches up against men unwilling to let a scrap of a boy, barely a man, lecture them on the merits of the common good. 

He crawls deeper into the shadows in response, stops tempting fate at the hands – the fists – of other men and lets himself sink into the comforting haze of smoky dens and dimming memories. The fire under his skin barely even flickers now; it’s so much easier to let the world spin without him to orchestrate its revolutions.

Curling into the dark, damp places he’s found, he lets go of daylight with a grateful sigh and gives himself over entirely to the crawling night. It is there that a well-dressed woman will find him, in time, there that she will force a man with broad shoulders and golden hair to sling him over a shoulder and carry him out of the streets he’s known all his life, but for now oblivion is all life has to offer anymore, and Merlin welcomes it.


End file.
